Wendell Phillips

Wendell Phillips (29 November 1811-2 February 1884) was a prominent American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney who was nicknamed "The Golden Trumpet" of abolitionism for his oratory.

Biography
Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1811, the son of Mayor John Phillips. He graduated from Harvard in 1833 and was admitted to the bar a year later. In 1835, Phillips witnessed a pro-slavery mob intimidate George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison into cancelling their planned abolitionist speeches, so Phillips decided to devote himself to the cause of abolitionism a year later. He joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and supported the free produce movement, under which he avoided cane sugar and wore no clothing made of cotton, since both were produced by African-American slaves. In 1846, he also became an advocate for women's rights to their property and women's suffrage, starting the first women's suffrage petition campaign in the state from 1849 to 1850. During the last years of the American Civil War, he began planning Reconstruction, arguing that the enfranchisement of freedmen would have to be a condition for the readmission of the former Confederacy into the Union. He fervently opposed President Andrew Johnson, and the Radical Republicans adopted many of Phillips' views, except for Phillips' view on redistributing land to freedmen. He supported Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party in the 1868 election, and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black suffrage, was passed in 1870. He worked with Grant's administration on the appointment of Indian agents and opposed Philip Sheridan's "extermination" of Native Americans, and he supported the land claims of the Sioux. He died in 1884.